Export Without Data Drops Your Variables — Here's How to Keep Them
Many Qlik Sense developers use "Export app without data" as the backbone of a backup or migration routine — a lightweight QVF you can restore or move between environments without hauling gigabytes of loaded data. Then someone opens the restored app and the numbers are wrong, set expressions collapse, and half the front end throws errors. The reason is quiet but consistent: exporting without data strips out the app's variables, and a lot of Qlik logic silently depends on them.
The manual backup-and-migrate way
The usual routine is to right-click the app, choose Export app (without data), and stash the QVF on a file share or in a folder someone calls "backups". To migrate, you import that QVF into the target stream or tenant and reload. It feels like a clean, portable snapshot of the app.
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But the without-data export drops variables along with the data model. Thresholds, default selections, path and vDate variables, flags that drive set analysis — all gone. The app imports fine and reloads without complaint, so nobody notices until a chart shows the wrong figure or a $(vSomething) reference breaks a formula. Rebuilding those variables by hand from memory or a screenshot is slow, error-prone, and defeats the point of having a backup at all.
How Gitoqlok keeps variables in every version
Gitoqlok versions the whole app design, not a stripped QVF. Open an app, click the Gitoqlok icon, and on the Local Changes tab click Save changes. With App objects ticked in the commit form, every variable is written to your Git repository as its own JSON file — one file per variable — alongside the sheets, master items, bookmarks and each load script section as a .qvs. Nothing is silently left behind, and the commit history gives you a dated restore point every time you save.
That makes both jobs reliable. To restore, pick an older commit in the commit selector and click Update — the variables come back exactly as committed. To migrate, open the target hub, choose Deploy from Git, select the repository, branch and commit, name the app and click Deploy: the new app arrives with its variables intact, and you can restore its data connections with Import Data Connections. See Deploy from Git and what Gitoqlok versions.